No. 3273

Flannel Cakes

Galettes Legeres

Place in a bowl four ounces of butter and two ounces of sugar; work well together to obtain a creamy preparation, then add four whole eggs one by one, and after the eggs are well incorporated put in eight ounces of flour and two gills of milk. Have the paste nice and smooth, and just when ready to use add a tablespoonful of baking powder mingled with an equal quantity of flour, then finish cooking and serve exactly the same as the buckwheat cakes (No. 3272).

← No. 3272 Buckwheat Cakes with Yeast Breakfast Cakes No. 3274 Indian Cakes →

For the Modern Kitchen

A rich, cake-like griddle batter — closer to a creamed butter cake than to a modern buttermilk pancake. Ranhofer gives weights rather than cups, which makes it easy to reproduce exactly.

The measurements in cupsFour ounces butter is one stick; two ounces sugar is a scant 1/3 cup; eight ounces flour is about 1 3/4 cups by scoop-and-level. Two gills of milk is one cup — a gill is half a cup.
Add the baking powder last, and mean itThe instruction to mix it with an equal amount of flour "just when ready to use" is the hinge of the recipe. Sifting it with a little flour keeps it from clumping in an already-thick batter, and the batter should hit the griddle within a few minutes of that addition, before the lift is spent.
A tablespoonful is generousOne tablespoon of baking powder to 8 oz flour works out to a little under 2 teaspoons per cup, at the upper end of modern practice. Period baking powders were generally weaker than today's, so with a current brand a smaller amount — around 2 teaspoons in total — may suit better.
Creaming, not stirringButter and sugar must be genuinely creamy before the eggs go in one at a time, or the batter will break. Have the butter at about 65F and the milk at room temperature; cold milk against creamed butter will seize it into flecks.
Griddle heatThis batter is rich in butter, so it browns quickly — a moderate griddle, around 350F, with light greasing, suits it better than a hot surface, which will color the outside before the interior sets. The recipe itself gives no temperature.
What No. 3272 tells you to doThe cross-reference is to buckwheat cakes raised with yeast; the cooking and serving details belong to that recipe. Nothing there changes the mixing here; only the cooking and service.
YieldAbout sixteen cakes of three to four inches — four servings at breakfast. The batter does not hold; cook it all at once.

A Little History

Galette légère translates roughly as "light cake," and its presence in The Epicurean (1894) shows Charles Ranhofer doing what he did throughout the book: giving a French name and French technique to something Americans already ate for breakfast. "Flannel cake" was a common nineteenth-century American term for a thin, soft griddle cake, said to be named for the napped cloth it resembled in texture; it appears in household cookbooks before Ranhofer set it down for Delmonico's. What distinguishes his version is the method — butter and sugar creamed, eggs beaten in one by one — which is patisserie practice applied to a griddle, and it produces something noticeably richer than the yeast-raised buckwheat cakes that precede it in the same section. The two recipes sitting side by side mark a transition in American baking: No. 3272 depends on a yeast batter, while this one relies on chemical baking powder, commercially available from the middle of the nineteenth century and by the 1890s an ordinary way to raise a breakfast cake in a hurry.